The Black Swan: read vs. unread books

Should your library consist mostly of read books, or of unread books? The avid and loyal MR reader will already know we are adjusting for "number of books read" in posing this query.

If you own mostly read books, you use your library for reference and remembrance. Your collection is like Proust’s madeleine. If you own mostly unread books, your library yields exciting discovery but also lots of clunkers. Each step to the shelf offers a chance to redefine your life and your loves in unexpected ways, or perhaps crashing disappointment.

If you are one of those Austrian economists who believes in the all-importance of unquantifiable Knightian uncertainty, I hope your shelves are full of unread books (we now, by the way, have the means to make this otherwise murky concept operational). Otherwise you are livin’ a dirty, stinkin’ lie. Karmic retribution will be swift and, yes, certain.

I found Shantaram utterly amazing – congratulations on still having that ahead of you. I read most of it sitting on the balcony of a hotel in the Austrian Alps last summer getting over the aftereffects of a dose of flu, while my wife and son went off walking. Am currently greatly enjoying *Red Earth And Pouring Rain*, Vikram Chandra’s first, after I first heard of hm when you recommended *Sacred Games*. Thanks.

Nassim Taleb is definitely one of my favorites, but I just can’t seem to grasp his hatred of the field of economics. For such a sharp person, his arguments concerning the economics orthodoxy are largely empty.

Still, Fooled by Randomness and Dynamic Hedging are two definite classics.

Um, not to sound clueless, but what does believing in Knightian uncertainty have to do with it? I realize it was said with tongue in cheek to some extent, but still, it seems a complete non sequitur to me.

Turn the “should” into “does” and I can answer that easily. Mostly unread.

Buying a book is a bit like bookmarking a webpage. Part of what you’re doing is making a note to yourself. If you buy to read, then “read this”, or if you buy because you might read, then “maybe read this”. Instead of buying the book you could create a list, constructing a “virtual library”.

I buy books intending to read them, and then typically (with exceptions) I don’t get around to reading them. I have a library now of books that are pretty interesting and that I don’t regret buying since I have a feeling I’ll be reading them at some point, but however interesting they are, I’m usually marginally more interested new books (i.e., new to me). Roughly speaking, my reading list is “last in, first out”.

If someone else buys me a book, then it lingers near the front of the “last in, first out” set of books. I feel a duty to read it, enough of a duty that I count it as something that I should read after I read one or two other books. But it tends to say in the number two or three spot of my reading list, however many books I read.

Yes, I second what Constant says as well except that I sadly almost never books lent or given me. They just rarely strike me as interesting as those I pick out for myself – I have the best taste in the world of course!

“Nassim Taleb is definitely one of my favorites, but I just can’t seem to grasp his hatred of the field of economics.”

I just can’t grasp why having read Taleb one would continue in the field of mainstream economics. But I guess that is the sunk cost bias ;-).

Also, I think the point Taleb is making is that we think we are smarter than we really are. The more we are confronted with the knowledge we don’t have the humbler we might be about what we think we know about the real world.

That seems to be his problem with mainstream econ. It also seems to me to be a central indictment of much of the blogosphere, where posters and commenters are the more certain among the population, and I assume in Talebian terms the more dangerous.